"How long would these take to polish one off?"
"Ten or twelve hours, chiefly in the form of a hoop. No, Berns, I can't recommend them." He drew from its jewelled sheath and put into Bernard's hands a Persian dagger nine inches long, the naked blade damascened in wavy ripplings and slightly curved from point to hilt. "That would do your trick better. Under the fifth rib. I bought it of a Greek muleteer, God knows how he got hold of it, but he was a bit of a poet: he assured me it would go in 'as soft as a kiss.' For its softness I cannot speak, but it is as sharp as a knife need be."
"Sharper," said Bernard, his thumb in his mouth.
"You silly ass, I warned you!— I should rather like to see this
Moore play. I suppose Laura never goes, as you don't?"
"I don't stop her going, as you jolly well know. She's welcome to go six nights a week if she likes."
"She couldn't very well go alone," Lawrence ignored the scowl of his host. "Tell you what: suppose I took her tonight? I could run her up and down in my car, or we could get back by the midnight train. Would the feelings of Chilmark be outraged?"
"What business is it of Chilmark's? If I'm complaisant, that's enough," said Bernard, his features relaxing into a broad grin. "I may be planked down in a country village for the rest of my very unnatural life, but I'll be shot if I'll regulate mine or my wife'& behaviour by the twaddle they talk! I'll have that dagger." Slipping it slowly into its sheath he watched it travel home, the supple female curve gliding and yielding as a woman yields to a man's caress. "Voluptuous, I call it. Under the left breast, eh?" He drew it again and held it poised and pointing at his cousin. "Come, even I could cut your heart out with a gem of a blade like that." Lawrence held himself lightly erect, his big frame stiffening from head to foot and the pupils of his eyes dilating till the irids were blackened. "Call Laura." Bernard sheathed the dagger again and laid it down. "She's out there snipping away at the roses. Why can't she leave 'em to Parker? She's always messing about out there dirtying her hands, and then she comes in and paws me. Call her in."
Lawrence escaped into the sunshine. He had not liked that moment when Bernard had held up the dagger, nor was it the first time that Bernard had made him shiver, but these vague apprehensions soon faded in the open air. It was a sallow sunshine, a light wind was blowing, and the lawn was spun over with brilliancies of gossamer and flecked with yellow leaflets of acacia and lime. Little light clouds floated overhead, sun-smitten to a fiery whiteness, or curling in gold and silver surf over the grey of distant hayfields. In the borders the velvet bodies of bees hung between the velvet petals, ruby-red, of dahlias. There had been no frost, and yet a foreboding of frost was in the air, a sparkle, a sting—enough to have braced Lawrence when he went down to bathe before breakfast, standing stripped amid long river-herbage drenched in dew, a west wind striking cold on his wet limbs: sensations exquisite so long as the blood of health and manhood glowed under the chilled skin! It was early autumn.
Time slips away fast in a country village, and Lawrence remained a welcome guest at Wanhope, where Chilmark said—though with a covert smile—that Captain Hyde had done his cousin a great deal of good. Bernard was better behaved with Lawrence than with any one else, less surly, less unsociable, less violently coarse: since June there had been fewer quarrels with Val and Barry and the servants, and less open incivility to Laura. He had even let Laura give a few mild entertainments, arrears of hospitality which she was glad to clear off: and he had appeared at them in person, polite and well dressed, and on the friendliest terms with his cousin and his wife.
Lawrence knew his own mind now. It was because he knew it that he held his hand: meeting Isabel two or three times a week, entering into the life of the little place because it was her life, fighting Val's battle with Bernard—and winning it— because Val was her brother. When he remembered his collapse he was not abashed: shame was an emotion which he rarely felt: but he had gone too far and too fast, and was content to mark time in a more rational and conventional courtship.